STRAIGHT AND AHEAD

LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING

A: OH, GOD, NO. I'VE HAD A WONDERFUL RELATIONSHIP WITH MY BODY LATE IN LIFE. EVEN THE THOUGHT OF SMOKING WEED GIVES ME THE CREEPS.

IGGY POP

interviewed in ROLLING STONE,

JANUARY 12-26, 2017

XXX

So what was your relationship like with the US punks, ‘cause you namecheck Richard Hell in a song…

Oh yeah, I just liked the name, I just thought it was funny, but I did meet him in America, you know, I thought they were all nice, they were nice to me… but I wasn’t really on that whole heroin vibe, that was more Chrissie and Debbie, more caught up in that, but they all detoxed, all clean now… I think Tessa got a bit involved with heroin, but she’s cleaned up through Tai Chi. A lot of people got through it if they didn’t die, Sid was one of the unfortunate ones. But luckily I never got into it. I saw very early on when I was a young teenager, I had a boyfriend, he was sixteen, that died of heroin, I don’t even think he knew what he was doing. I witnessed that at a very young age so I was very careful about drugs during X Ray Spex. I don’t think drugs are glamorous. Not really. I think there was a flirtation with it, just like with cocaine it’s sort of a rich person’s drug and therefore it’s ‘glamorous’, and heroin had a glamorous thing to it in the punk days, from America, because those bands were quite glamorous, but when you think about it, I just think it victimizes people, it makes artists made more vulnerable to be able to be worked without proper payment, just for their drugs. When you hear about it in modeling, it all goes hand in hand with a negative outcome I think.

So you managed to sidestep that with Spex…

Oh yeah, we were pretty clean, I think our boys might have drunk a little bit but that’s about it really.